The candle flame flickered dimly, and faint trails of blue smoke curled through the air.
An old woman sat on a prayer mat, her eyes half-closed.
Her withered fingers rubbed a string of white bone beads, her lips twitching as she mumbled an indistinct incantation.
Inside a shrine stood a sinister clay deity statue, its face half-concealed by a piece of faded red cloth.
On the altar table lay offerings of fruit and a black ceramic bowl filled with a dark red liquid that reeked of blood.
Just three feet above the old woman's head, the air rippled slightly.
A woman in white hovered in mid-air. Her expression was cold and aloof, her gaze indifferent, and her entire body was enveloped in an extremely faint halo of light.
Not far away,
a nine-tailed white fox perched on a roof beam. Its fluffy tail hung down, gently brushing against the hanging talismans.
The talismans fluttered despite the lack of wind.
Though another person and a little fox had entered the room, the old woman on the prayer mat remained completely oblivious.
Yun Shu walked over to the old woman, her gaze sweeping past her aged face to rest on the string of bone beads in her hand.
They were made from the hand bones of six children.
Ancient people were mostly superstitious, believing in ghosts and gods; men like Shen Jue, who dismissed such notions, were a rare exception.
Because of this belief, some nobles and royals were extremely meticulous about their afterlives. Fearing they would have no one to serve them in the underworld after they died, they resorted to human sacrifice, burying the living with the dead.
The blind old woman before her was the renowned "Half-Immortal" of Chaoyang City. Rumor had it that she possessed a miraculous spell capable of preserving the corpses of sacrificial victims from decay.
“Host, some humans are truly cruel. How could she bring herself to pour mercury into the heads of living people?”
The little fox sighed in disbelief.
Even as an artificial intelligence, merely reading the text descriptions made its skin crawl. It was simply too barbaric.
“In the end, it is nothing more than a pursuit of fame or wealth.”
Wearing the Floating Cloud Hairpin—a headpiece from the Mystic Sound of the Nine Heavens Set that granted invisibility—Yun Shu wandered openly right in front of the blind crone. Her Eyes of Good and Evil could only reveal a list of the woman's sins, not the specific details of how they were committed.
However, this did not hinder her plans.
The novel had mentioned her.
Born blind, she was abandoned by her parents as a child and later somehow acquired a repertoire of dark arts.
The Lan family had treated the blind crone as an honored guest. Relying on her dark arts, they had ruined many business rivals, and through her expertise in funerary rites, they had made connections with numerous powerful nobles in the capital.
Of course, the blind crone did not offer her services for free. She demanded that the Lan family deliver Fang Shuo, the Governor's son, to her.
However, Fang Shuo was incredibly lucky. He always managed to encounter benefactors who rescued him from dire straits. While Governor Fang was alive, the Governor protected him, so the blind crone never succeeded.
After Governor Fang passed away, Xu Miao watched over Fang Shuo constantly, so she still failed to get her hands on him.
By the time the blind crone went through immense trouble and devised a scheme to eliminate the troublesome Xu Miao, it seemed she was finally on the verge of capturing Fang Shuo alive.
Yet, right at that moment, Shen Jue arrived with an army of thirty thousand iron cavalry, laying siege to Chaoyang City in his quest to unify the north.
Without even putting up a show, Fang Shuo surrendered immediately. He voluntarily opened the city gates to welcome Shen Jue, who loathed sorcery and witchcraft above all else.
The outcome was easily foreseen.
The blind crone walked straight into the line of fire and was publicly torn apart by chariots. The Lan family's estate was confiscated, and the entire family was exiled.
As for Fang Shuo, he had absolutely no idea from start to finish that anyone had been plotting against him. He comfortably inherited the Fang family fortune and lived out his days in leisurely indulgence.
In the ending of this novel set in a chaotic era, even the male lead, Shen Jue, met a tragic end, yet Fang Shuo was able to die peacefully of old age.
Honestly, if someone posted a life like Fang Shuo's online, the comments section would be flooded with people trying to claim his good fortune.
Oh? She seemed to understand why the blind crone had targeted Fang Shuo. Practitioners of the dark arts in ancient times were deeply superstitious about fate, believing that certain unorthodox methods could allow them to steal or swap someone else's destiny.
With this in mind,
she took another look around the room, which was covered in talismans.
Then, she discovered a pile of bones in the corner. Judging by their rough bone age, none of them appeared to be over eighteen years old.
This blind crone...
death by a thousand cuts would truly be too light a punishment for her sins.
Right at that moment,
a sudden noise came from outside the door.
A middle-aged man's footsteps were heavy and hurried. As he rushed through the courtyard, he accidentally knocked over a flowerpot, shattering it into pieces, but he could not spare a moment to look back.
He crossed the threshold in a few swift strides.
The candlelight flickered in the draft from the open door, and the blind crone turned her cloudy, pale eyes toward him.
“What are you doing here?” her voice rasped.
The middle-aged man shut the door behind him and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
After appearing to deliberate for a long time, he finally spoke, “Blind Granny, this is bad. A Divine Lady has manifested in the world.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, every candle flame in the room leaped in unison.
The blind crone stopped rubbing her bone beads.
“Did you see it with your own eyes?” she asked.
“I wasn't in Chaoyang City yesterday, so I didn't see this Divine Lady they speak of. But a highly unusual palace has indeed appeared out of thin air on the wasteland outside the city.”
As the middle-aged man spoke, his voice grew even lower.
“Blind Granny, the things we've done might be hidden from the government, but they cannot be hidden from the gods. What should we do?”
The blind crone fell silent for a long time.
She resumed rubbing the bone beads, but this time, her movements were noticeably slower, as if she were calculating her options.
“Since she knows what we have done but has not immediately punished us, it means she either has reservations, or she is a fraud with no real power.”
The middle-aged man's eyes lit up. “Exactly! If that Divine Lady actually had divine power, would she need that useless fool from the Fang family to investigate his father's cause of death? We almost fell into a trap.”
He let out a long sigh of relief and bowed to the blind crone.
“Thank you for clearing my doubts, Blind Granny.”
As the blind crone's cloudy eyes “looked” at him, he felt an inexplicable chill run down his spine, prompting him to take an instinctive step back.
“Lan Tao, if you bring me more useless trash who cannot help me alter my destiny, I will not spare you next time.”
Hearing this, Lan Tao shuddered violently, his eyes darting instinctively toward the pile of white bones in the corner.
Over the years, to keep the blind crone on their side, he had brought her no fewer than ten young boys and girls, yet none of them were what she desired.
She was utterly fixated on Fang Shuo.
“Blind Granny, Yi'er has already married into the Fang family. It won't be long before she can deliver Fang Shuo to you.”
At this point, his expression faltered slightly. “It's just... I'm worried that Divine Lady might ruin our plans.”
Initially, he had planned to marry Lan Yi to Fang Shuo, but that ungrateful brat had run away from home, forcing him to have Lan Yi marry into the Fang family as a second wife instead.
Just when they thought Fang Shuo was at their mercy, Governor Fang sent him away to Yecheng. Thus, they had no choice but to use Governor Fang's death to lure Fang Shuo back to Chaoyang City.
Who could have expected it would attract some Divine Lady?
“What is there to panic about? The Great Immortal will protect us.”
The blind crone stood up and, as was her custom, lit incense and bowed three times to the clay deity statue in the shrine.
“Still, caution is the parent of safety.”
“Go gather more information. If things take a turn for the worse, we will take a boat out to sea to lie low.”
With that,
she shakily inserted the incense into the burner.
In the next instant, a bizarre phenomenon occurred in the room.
The surrounding talismans fluttered wildly without any wind, and the copper bells wrapped in red strings on the roof beams began to ring incessantly.
“Wh-What is happening?”
Having already collapsed to the ground in terror, Lan Tao scrambled on all fours to huddle beside the blind crone's feet.
“Blind Granny... the statue... the statue is moving...”
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